In an environment have set of 10 SLES Servers which are needed to be patched with all recommended patches at same level.

IF i take a set of 5 servers at a time and other after 7 days in this scenario after patching the all servers will all the SLES severs have the same patch level or it will vary ?

Require your suggestions or recommendations for SLES OS Patching.

ab

01-Jan-2013, 07:43

That depends on if you point the servers to a source that still has the
same patches available after those seven days have patched.

I know a guy who can make this really simple for you using SMT:
https://www.suse.com/documentation/smt11/

Basically SMT mirrors patches from Novell/SUSE to your site; this is great
on the surface because instead of downloading every patch ten times, you
download it once and then server to your servers from your internal SMT
box. Great stuff, but besides that SMT lets you setup staging/production
channels within SMT, so you can point your test boxes to the testing
channel (with all patches you allow in there) and then watch things work.
After you're happy (seven days perhaps) you can promote those patches to
the production channel and then your production servers, when upgraded,
will only get those patches you have staged/tested on the other boxes.
Beautiful stuff, and it's all free.

If you point all of your servers directly to the main patch channels
hosted by Novell/SUSE it is LIKELY that after any number of days (one or
more) the patches will be different because each RPM can have patches on
any day, and patches come out most days for something within SLES.

Good luck.

ab

01-Jan-2013, 07:45

I should probably mention that you could always apply patches specifically
instead of generally... instead of just telling the system to update all
you could do that for the first batch of machines, make note of what
applies, and then ONLY apply those manually to the second batch of
machines a week later. Bleh.... use SMT instead so not only does that
work but you save bandwidth, get faster downloads to the servers, have
things able to run even if network connections all over the world go
astray (because SMT has local copies), etc.

Good luck.

aspund

01-Jan-2013, 08:05

Thanks a lot for your recommendations and suggestions.
I will go with your opinion for installing the SMT and patch all the SLES Servers .
I was stuck at point with the question in mind for adding the patches now got resolved.